NOVEMBER 1, 2016

On the north side of Pittsburgh there is a street called General Michael V. Hayden Boulevard, named in honor of the former director of the NSA and CIA. Hayden, who is one of the foremost authorities on intelligence on earth, is a Pittsburgh native and has as much pride for his hometown as he does for his country.1 The street is just a few blocks from Heinz Field, where the young Hayden served as an equipment manager for the Pittsburgh Steelers, the football team he protects ferociously.

So when Trump trash-talked the Steelers for joining two other NFL teams in a protest by locking arms and refusing to stand on the field during the national anthem before a game, Hayden defended them.² He wrote an op-ed in the Hill, a top US political website that has a wide readership among DC politicians, noting that his hometown was patriotic, because they opted out of the emotional poker game being played between Trump and their team.

“As a 39-year military veteran, I think I know something about the flag, the anthem, patriotism, and I think I know why we fight,” he wrote. “It's not to allow the president to divide us by wrapping himself in the national banner. I never imagined myself saying this before Friday, but if now forced to choose in this dispute, put me down with [Colin] Kaepernick.”³

Hayden is still a football-minded, no-nonsense guy who tends to explain his actions or those of the government as if he were a ref explaining tackles, touchdowns, interceptions, a game in play, or the overall rules. He is one of the few leaders who knows the rules of cyber espionage that have evolved since he became NSA director in 1999, at the dawn of the new information age.4 While in the past the NSA focused mainly on collecting information over the airwaves, the playing field has changed. He was in a sense among our country's first hackers, the first cyber juggernauts, who broke into other countries’ computer realms and poked around. He noted that this was exciting, although the NSA was limited in what it could do once in that area. For example, NSA operatives were unable to do anything that may constitute an act of war, such as compromising other countries’ military computers.

In an interview with CBS News national security correspondent David Martin, Hayden described how he graduated to becoming the first head of cyber command. In that capacity, he described how the agency developed a “stable of weapons” in cyberspace.⁵ He couldn't give any specific information because, he said, “This is so hideously overclassified, it's hard for us to have an adult discussion about what it is we are or are not doing.”

Hayden, who served with the NSA until 2005, then served as the CIA's director from 2006 to 2009, is well versed on any little-known rules governing cyber-espionage attacks coming from and being fielded by the United States.⁶ But the rule book is thin. Although Hayden doesn't believe the Russian attacks on the US electoral system are an act of war, but rather more like a covert operation, there are no formal definitions for either in the cyber realm.

Pentagon leaders and members of Congress are still grappling with coming up with an explanation of how cyberspace actions could constitute war.⁷

When I met Hayden in the third-floor interview room at the CBS offices in Washington, DC, less than a week before the elections, where everyone in the newsroom was working around the clock, I found him to be a refreshing interviewee.

Hayden wears glasses and has the kind of distinguished charm of good men of his generation. His expression was always patient and affable, as if he was the kind of guy who had seen it all and so knew the value of a good joke. He was as easy to talk to about his history with the Steelers as he was about the upcoming election. He had an unusual political perspective and an uncanny way of boiling things down so that they were understandable. Since he worked as a private consultant, he was able to speak more freely about his views. He certainly didn't censor himself when it came to speaking about the upcoming elections.8

Pegues: Let's start with the connections. Can we talk about Trump's alleged ties to Russia? Is there something there that sort of gives you pause? You've got Mr. Trump who just seems to bend himself into whatever shape he needs to bend himself in order to avoid criticizing the Russian Federation, their foreign policy, or their president. So where does that kind of rationale come from?

Hayden: Well, it could come from a legitimate worldview. I mean there could be parallax that connects all these dots, but I haven't seen all that yet. Frankly, Mr. Trump doesn't have a lot of background in foreign affairs. What he says seems to be stray electrons or, let me be kind, points of light. But I can't find a worldview in which all of those points of light seem to come together.

Pegues: What kind of world does the president face?

Hayden: Here's what I think the real issue is. You have lots of things going on. You have the North Koreans, the South China Sea, there's ISIS, Putin, and then Ukraine. I could go on, but fundamentally I think we're seeing the melting down of the post–World War II American liberal, Bretton Woods, World Bank, IMF [International Monetary Fund] world order. The world order that we largely constructed about seventy-five years ago is no longer adequate to the world in which we find ourselves. So, not only do we see the melting down of that and a growing disorder, now we have to face a fundamental question as a nation. It's hidden in the [2016 presidential] campaign, but you can see reflections of it, and it's fundamentally this: how much of a responsibility are we now going to embrace to build a new global structure? By the way, we did a pretty good job on the last one. I mean, the world has seen remarkable progress in that seventy-five years of American hegemony. Now the choice is, how much do we embrace a responsibility for what goes forward?

Pegues: What does that new world order look like, now that you've brought it up?

Hayden: It looks like a work in progress. How much of that do we want to be influenced by American liberal—small “l”—values? There are an awful lot of other competing value systems out there now. One that's gotten a lot of traction globally—and, frankly, I think we see it reflected in our own election—is authoritarian populism. We see it in Venezuela; we see it in Turkey; we see it in Russia; we see it in a lot of places.

Now what do the ideals of American liberalism have to do with creating a world order in which authoritarian populism seems to be gaining strength?

Pegues: Are you seeing that authoritarian populism here?

Hayden: I have said publicly that the American face of this global movement toward authoritarian populism is the Trump campaign—it's nativism, it's trans-authoritarian, [and] it's certainly a bit isolationist. We see that reflected in other countries as well. This is not a call for American supremacy, certainly not a call for American hegemony.

One definition of an exceptional nation—and we have been described as that in past decades—is a nation that does things for the good of the order, rather than a narrowly defined sense of national self-interest.

One aspect of the [2016] campaign, particularly the Trump campaign, is to pretty much confine all international decisions to a very narrow definition of American self-interest. That may be good, it may be bad, but it's different. It's not the role we played for the last three quarters of a century.

Pegues: And the role that Russia has played, it seems to be some sort of resurgence in the sense that Putin seems to be inserting himself into our political landscape. This idea of the Russians trying to influence the election, is it real?

Hayden: I think it's real. But let me go back to your premise about Russia and what it is or what it is not. I actually go out of my way to say that Russia is not a resurgent power.

Frankly, all the things that Russia needs to be somebody [important] in a global competition, it's running out of. It's running out of entrepreneurship. A growing portion of the Russian GDP is coming out of state-owned enterprises. That's not a winning formula. It's running out of democracy. You've seen that. It's running out of available oil and gas.

And, most fundamentally, it's running out of Russians—that is, a declining population. The life expectancy there is below that of the old Soviet Union. I've said that in other forays he's [Putin's] doing all this troublesome activity, and he doesn't have a pair of sevens in his hand. He's playing a weak hand.

One of the bold moves, as our intelligence community has reported with a high level of confidence, is that Putin is trying to affect the American political process.

Pegues: You've studied Putin?

Hayden: I have studied him. I'm very fond of Bob Gates who, before he became secretary of defense, was in the office I used to occupy at Langley [CIA]. Secretary Gates came back from his first meeting with Putin, kind of paraphrasing President Bush [who said the same thing after meeting Putin], ‘I looked into Putin's eyes…[and] I saw the KGB.’ And you know what? That's really important. We know that the KGB has an endlessly conspiratorial view of the world. They view the world through that lens. Vladimir Putin was convinced that I spent almost all of my nearly three years at Langley thinking up ways to make his life more difficult.

Pegues: Did you?

Hayden: As the director of the CIA—of course! He just expects, given that historical kind of Marxist-shaped view of the world, that that's how other countries treat him.

Pegues: As an intelligence guy you have to sort of get in his head, right? What's his next move? You have intelligence agencies across this country thinking that way now, right? You have to stay one step ahead.

Hayden: Right. You want to use a metaphor? He's got the ball. He's playing offense, and he's going to the line of scrimmage. He's checking out the defense, and whatever ground that defense gives him. That's where that play's going; that's how he's working right now, which is a little bit different than saying this is a strategically resurgent power that's going to be occupying a more massive space in global geopolitics.

It's not. He's not a great strategic thinker. He looks to be of a brilliant tactical one, though.

The interview with Hayden shook me. I thought about it regularly, when I was pouring my girls’ cereal, when I was sitting in my office after the morning newscast. It wasn't so much what Hayden said that disturbed me, but the certainty with which he said it.

Hayden was a refreshingly straight talker whose insight about Putin and Trump would hold up as the Russia investigation unfolded. He had earned the right to speak his mind, a position most intelligence officials don't feel licensed to do, even after they are retired. The things he told me were enlightening because they confirmed what I already knew in a succinct way. His authority gave them weight. For example, he implied that Trump may have been compromised by the Russians, that the intelligence community believed Putin is trying to undermine our democracy, and that we weren't pushing back.

It was this last factor that left a bad taste in my mouth. The reason we weren't pushing back at the time was largely because President Obama was being cautious and didn't want to be seen as pandering to one party. Michael Daniel, the former cybersecurity coordinator at the White House during the Obama administration, said the federal authorities didn't tell the states they were hacked sooner partly for the same reason. When they did tell them, they were accused of pandering. Our democracy had fostered a certain defensive divisiveness that was endangering us. What would our unwillingness to push back cost us?